


In the Early Morning

by telm_393



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
Genre: Angst, Flash Fic, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-08
Updated: 2014-08-08
Packaged: 2018-02-12 07:00:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2099991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telm_393/pseuds/telm_393
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everybody's lost somebody.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Early Morning

**Author's Note:**

> So I noticed there was a lot of fun fic for this movie and I was like, haha, I want to contribute! And then I came out with this pure, unrelenting angst. So, yeah.

It’s been twenty-six years and sometimes Peter forgets his mother’s face. 

He feels guilty that he remembers her best when she was sick, when she was dying. He thinks there must be something seriously wrong with him, that that’s what he remembers best, that and a wide smile, a hand on his head.

He looks at himself in the mirror sometimes way longer than he has to—the others think it’s vanity—hoping he’ll remember her through him, hoping he’ll realize that he looks like her.

Except he doesn’t. It’s one of those things that he just knows, like the fact that the Terran sky is blue.

+

Drax remembers his wife and daughter’s faces with ease, though there is no pictorial evidence that they ever existed. 

The day they died haunts him every night.

And then in the early morning there is the sound of a child’s laughter in his head, and he turns, almost says his beautiful little girl’s name before realizing: no.

No.

And there is the sound of his own name in his wife’s voice, the way that she said it that always sounded singular to him, and he turns.

Reaches out for empty space.

He does not understand many metaphors, even now, sharing a ship with Quill, but there is one with an explanation that made sense, one that he understands because with his grief there truly is a physical pain, there is nothing figurative about it.

So here is a metaphor: their death is an open wound.

It is bleeding, bleeding.

+

Gamora’s nights are spent listening to her parents scream, spent privy to her family’s slaughter time and time again. 

It makes her ill that she was the favorite of the one who killed them. 

She was not the favorite in her true family, because as far as she can remember—it is very far—everyone was equally loved.

When she was younger than she is now, she would dream of her family during the day, with her eyes open as she became the perfect little killing machine, and she would finally, finally be able to remember the songs her mother hummed almost under her breath, the way her father would pick her up and swing her around until she was dizzy.

+

Rocket doesn’t remember much before the scientists.

Warm noses pressing into his fur. Other pairs of eyes. He played, sometimes, he thinks. 

Mostly, though, he can’t remember shit, so there’s nothing to miss about his old life. 

That’s what he tells himself.

+

Groot is Groot.

He has nobody but the people around him, the people on this ship.

They are enough, but sometimes. Sometimes he misses the days when all around him understood his meanings.

That is all he has to say.


End file.
